Look, I know it’s dramatic, but 2017 was tough and I’m not even going to try to sugar coat it. Despite this, I saw some incredible work that helped me make some sense of the world we find ourselves in today. Here are 9 highlights: 1. Kenyatta Hinkle, The Evanesced @ CAAM The Evanesced at CAAM … Continue reading The Art that Helped Me Survive 2017
When artists leave us too soon we are reminded of their greatness in the items they left behind. Musicians have libraries of unreleased tracks or compositions, photographers leave behind negatives, contact sheets and undeveloped film, painters have hidden canvases or incomplete work and writers leave behind their words—ideas that weren’t fully developed, concepts that never came to … Continue reading Octavia E. Butler: Telling My Stories
Yesterday’s post on Radio Imagination at the Armory Center for the Arts focused on one artist’s creative interpretation of Octavia Butler’s famous novels, Kindred. The show also featured digital snapshots of Butler’s papers currently cataloged at the Huntington Library in Pasadena. Manuscripts, character sketches, childhood stories, and journal entries all provide us with an expositive look into Butler’s creative process including … Continue reading “So Be It, See To It.”
One of the best books I read in 2016 was Kindred by Octavia Butler and one of the most powerful essays I read in 2016 was “Broken Defaced and Unseen: the Hidden Black Female Figures of Western Art”, by Robin Coste Lewis. One work explored time travel, slavery and the black female body while the other takes the … Continue reading Octavia Butler’s Radio Imagination
